e; but it is of the utmost, that she should be able to show kindness
to a stranger, and to understand the sweetness of a stranger's tongue.
It is of no moment to her own worth or dignity that she should be
acquainted with this science or that; but it is of the highest that she
should be trained in habits of accurate thought; that she should
understand the meaning, the inevitableness, and the loveliness of
natural laws; and follow at least some one path of scientific
attainment, as far as to the threshold of that bitter Valley of
Humiliation, into which only the wisest and bravest of men can descend,
owning themselves forever children, gathering pebbles on a boundless
shore. It is of little consequence how many positions of cities she
knows, or how many dates of events, or names of celebrated persons--it
is not the object of education to turn a woman into a dictionary; but
it is deeply necessary that she should be taught to enter with her
whole personality into the history she reads; to picture the passages
of it vitally in her own bright imagination; to apprehend, with her
fine instincts, the pathetic circumstances and dramatic relations,
which the historian too often only eclipses by his reasoning, and
disconnects by his arrangement: it is for her to trace the hidden
equities of divine reward, and catch sight, through the darkness, of
the fatal threads of woven fire that connect error with its
retribution. But, chiefly of all, she is to be taught to extend the
limits of her sympathy with respect to that history which is being for
her determined as the moments pass in which she draws her peaceful
breath: and to the contemporary calamity, which, were it but rightly
mourned by her, would recur no more hereafter. She is to exercise
herself in imagining what would be the effects upon her mind and
conduct, if she were daily brought into the presence of the suffering
which is not the less real because shut from her sight. She is to be
taught somewhat to understand the nothingness of the proportion which
that little world in which she lives and loves, bears to the world in
which God lives and loves;--and solemnly she is to be taught to strive
that her thoughts of piety may not be feeble in proportion to the
number they embrace, nor her prayer more languid than it is for the
momentary relief from pain of her husband or her child, when it is
uttered for the multitudes of those who have none to love them,--and
is, "for all who